Nexus 5 doesn’t topple the Moto X, but it was never meant to

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

With the release of the Nexus 5, the Android ecosystem got its second top-notch superphone running a vanilla build of Google’s mobile operating system. When Motorola announced the other, the Moto X, and its suite of built-in innovations, the company almost instantly reversed its fortunes; people could finally see Google’s influence at work, pushing its fully owned handset company to innovate.

Comparisons between the two are inevitable, since LG’s Nexus 5 is seen as a direct stab for the portion of the market that responded so powerfully to Moto X. Don’t let that fool you into thinking that the two phones have no distinguishing characteristics, however.

Though it’s the older phone by several months, the Moto X remains the more feature-rich of these two high-powered handsets. The Nexus 5 will ship with Android 4.4 KitKat, while Moto X users will have to wait for an update from 4.2.2 Jelly Bean — though they likely won’t be waiting for long, thanks to the phone’s vanilla Android build.

In general terms, the two biggest unique features of the Moto X are missing from the Nexus 5: always-on voice commands and Active Notifications. These seemed to create the most excitement among fans, especially Active Notifications, which predicts and displays information without the user having to ask. If you take Moto X out of your pocket and look at the screen, it will automatically display the time, upcoming appointments, and any other information you might need. You can wake and control an idle Moto X handset with spoken commands, and voice recognition will ensure that only you can do so.

Yet the Moto X is not, strictly speaking, a super-powered handset. Motorola sacrificed the bleeding edge in processing speed so it could squeeze in all the phone’s special features, but LG had to make no such concessions. While the Nexus 5 lacks some of the voice recognition abilities of its competitor, it remains unquestionably the more powerful computing machine. The min-maxing crowd, the set that puts multiple third party task managers on their start page, will probably opt for the Nexus 5’s more streamlined approach.

This seems like the right approach for LG to be taking right now. Following the positive public reaction to the Moto X, LG had to make sure that one of their biggest brands didn’t acquire the air of an also-ran. The Moto X was built around its special features, so simply shoving those same features into a Nexus platform could never equal their success. The Nexus 5 appeals more directly to the sensibility that prefers vanilla OS builds; that’s a feature in itself, and one they should not discard for a me-too notifications app.

This is the start of what will likely be a long-running rivalry between Motorola and the Nexus brand. Both are scrambling to satisfy the calls for simplicity that became so much louder after Samsung’s feature-loaded Galaxy franchise all but took over the market. If the dichotomy between the Nexus 5 and the Moto X is any indication of how that battle will go, then at least both companies seem to appreciate the need for a unique identity.

The Nexus 5 and Moto X are similar phones that still have a distinct, coherent sense of what makes them special. Buyers really can’t go wrong either way.